SPECIAL EVENTS

MILITANT INDEX

End US economic war against people of Cuba

SWP: Emulate example of the Cuban Revolution!

Celebration in Pinar del Río, Cuba, July 26, on anniversary of opening of the Cuban Revolution with the 1953 attack on the Batista dictatorship’s Moncada military barracks.

The following statement was released Aug. 2 by Mary Martin, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of Seattle.

The Cuban Revolution is living proof that working people can unite, organize, fight, transform ourselves in struggle, take political power from the propertied rulers and begin to build a society qualitatively different from dog-eat-dog capitalism — a socialist society based on human solidarity.

This is the significance of the celebrations in Cuba, the U.S. and elsewhere marking the anniversary of the 1953 attack on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel Céspedes garrisons by Fidel Castro and other young Cuban revolutionaries, opening the revolutionary struggle that led to the 1959 overthrow of the U.S.-backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship.

The introduction to the book Cuba and the Coming American Revolution by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes says, “Cuba showed us that with class solidarity, political consciousness, courage, focus and persistent efforts at education, and a revolutionary leadership of a caliber like that in Cuba — a leadership tested and forged in battle over years, it is possible to stand up to enormous might and seemingly insurmountable odds and win.”

In October, young people, workers and others from the U.S. and around the world will spend two weeks in Cuba as part of the “In the Footsteps of Che International Brigade.” Che Guevara was a central leader of the revolution who fell in combat in 1967 at the hands of the CIA while leading Bolivian, Cuban and other combatants in an effort to mobilize workers and farmers to overthrow the Bolivian dictatorship.

Join me on the brigade, to see firsthand Cuba’s social advances, such as free health care and education for all, part of social relations that can only exist in a country where the working class holds political power.

Above all we’ll talk with Cuban workers and farmers whose solidarity, confidence, determination and internationalism made possible the sending of some 425,000 volunteers to Angola between 1975 and 1991 to defend that country’s newly won independence, help defeat the invading apartheid South African army, and win the liberation of Namibia.

The Cuban people extend solidarity with others fighting around the world, expecting nothing in return. They know the future lies in the hands of workers and youth who emulate their example and overthrow capitalist exploitation, racism and war. That is what my party, the Socialist Workers Party, is about.

The capitalist rulers of the United States fear that working people in the U.S., looking for a way out of the deepening economic, political, social and moral crisis of the capitalist system, will become attracted to the Cuban road. This is why Washington has never stopped seeking to overthrow the revolution, tightened its decadeslong economic embargo against Cuba, and refuses to give up its naval base and notorious prison at Guantánamo Bay.

The Socialist Workers Party is campaigning with workers on their doorsteps in big cities, small towns and rural areas across the country. We have seen how working people aremore and more open to learning about the Cuban example.

Join me on the brigade to learn how better to explain the Cuban Revolution to workers and young people here. Join the Socialist Workers Party!